Re: Fw: [avr-gcc-list] placing a variable in flash

[Geoffrey Wossum]

On Monday 22 November 2004 12:19 pm, E. Weddington wrote:

> 2. Ease of use.
> Reading and writing the EEPROM is easy especially for small values,
> because each byte can be erased. While reading Flash is easy, it is more
> complicated to write to Flash because you have to erase and write a
> block of data at a time, which means you need to flush the contents of a
> Flash block to a RAM buffer, erase the block and write the block with
> the new contents.

As I understand it, there is no way for normal application on an AVR to write 
to program flash memory.  Only code running in the bootloader area is allowed 
to write to program flash.  Is this correct?  That's a huge ease of use 
issue.

I got around this by having a special mode in my bootloader that copies a 
block of data from E2 to a fixed area in flash.  I use this for manufacturing 
information I really don't want lost, like serial number and 802.15.4 MAC 
address.  This may seem like overkill, but in the past we've had problems 
with the AVR's E2 "losing" data.  I think this was only on the old ATmega103, 
and that is fixed on parts like the ATmega128.  Because of these old 
problems, though, we're still a little shy about using the ATmega's E2 for 
stuff we don't want to lose.  

---
Geoffrey Wossum
Long Range Systems - http://www.pager.net